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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2019

The Geller Effect, UAP injury cases, and More

by: Brent Raynes

In my last column, I had reported on two distinguished medical researchers, Garry Nolan, Ph.D., and Christopher “Kit” Green, M.D., Ph.D., who back on November 30th of last year had given a presentation entitled “Anomalous Mental Phenomena” to the Space Genetics Symposium at the Harvard Medical School on their in-depth study of over a hundred “experiencers” of “orbs, voices, and entities” who displayed higher than average IQs, increased intuitive awareness, and whose MRI brain scans revealed increased neuronal density levels of the caudate-putamen region of the brain compared to a control grouping of non-experiencers. While Dr. Garry Nolan was brought in on this project only a few years ago, his colleague Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green was initiated into the study of such “experiencers” back in 1972 while he was manning what some called the “weird desk” as an analyst for the CIA’s Life Sciences Division. That November he became a handler of Uri Geller, assigned the job by the CIA director at that time, Richard Helms, and a case manager for the testing of the controversial Israeli psychic that was to go on with scientists at California’s SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and the nearby Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Though Green left the CIA in 1985, his interest in these matters never left him. He reportedly remained an active military and intelligence science adviser to the CIA and the Department of Defense. The work with Geller certainly sparked a series of reported high strangeness events that were especially unique and bewildering. Green described to noted journalist Annie Jacobsen (1) how in 2005 he began working on a research project to probe further into these puzzling phenomena, and he shared how he set out to create “a structured database of individuals that were suffering enigmatic injuries, burns, skin lesions, cancers, disease – and who also had face-to-face encounters with UAPs [unidentified aerial phenomena].” Jacobsen learned that it was an unresolved aspect of the CIA’s psychic research with Geller in late 1974, while working with nuclear scientists at the Lawrence Livermore lab, that continued to puzzle him decades later. It began one day when Green received a phone call at CIA headquarters at Langley from an AEC security officer connected with the Lawrence Livermore lab. “He told me there was a serious problem,” Green recalled. “Several of the nuclear weapons engineers had reported seeing things they could not rationally explain. These included ‘items flying across the room. Lights flashing. A six-inch ball of light, rolling down the hallway. One scientist reported seeing a flying orb. One of the scientists claimed to have seen a large raven, perched on a piece of furniture inside [his] home.” In “Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?” (2) author Jonathan Margolis (1999) also recounted the bizarre things that the Livermore scientists had experienced while Geller was involved with experiments, including a time when scientists in the lab were reportedly in a discussion when a small 8-inch diameter looking gray saucer-shaped object suddenly appeared and flew about the room and then vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. One physicist and his wife reportedly saw a phantom arm just appear in the air of their home. The sleeve of the arm was covered by plain gray material while there was a hook where one would have expected a hand! After awhile it vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. A CIA guy that Margolis referred to as “Rick” [who we now know was Green] wanted to meet privately with SRI’s scientists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ to discuss with them what the Livermore scientists were describing. “I was furious,” Green recalled. As Puthoff and Targ were both laser physicists he suspected that perhaps they were playing some sort of holographic prank on their colleagues at a rival lab. He was hoping for a confession. They swore they had nothing to do with the matter. As Green was talking about the mysterious arm with the hook, a loud knocking sound came from the motel room door where this meeting was being held. Green opened the door. In the Margolis account, a middle-aged man wearing a grey suit walked stiffly into the room, stood briefly stating in an odd, slow voice, “I guess I must be in the wrong room,” and then exited the room. Both Green and Puthoff notied that this odd stranger only had one arm!

Jacobsen wrote: “Green concluded that what was going on had to have been ‘some kind of high-technology psychological operation,’ one that involved holograms, lasers, and small unmanned aerial vehicles, all advanced technologies that were just coming online as black programs at CIA in the mid-1970s.”

Green (again referred to as Rick in Margolis’ book) learned of an audiotape made in the lab where a “peculiar, unintelligible metallic voice” was recorded, though no one had heard anything during the taping. As he listened to the audio Green was quite alarmed to hear one recognizable top secret codename for a high-security government project known to him but not to anyone at Livermore.

In a phone conversation I had with Uri Geller a few years back, I shared with him an account that a distinguished Ohio UFO researcher named Earl J. Neff had shared with me that reminded me of what had happened with the Livermore scientists. Neff told me that a popular radio personality named Ken Courtright [who has since passed away] had told him how he and a couple of other men were having a snack in their little kitchen one cold winter evening at radio station WJW (850 AM), with towers at North Royalton, Ohio, when something really odd happened. Geller had recently done a radio show there. “It was still light enough out to see the big radio towers,” Neff told me. “All at once one of the men noticed a most unusual thing occurring. It was like a time lapse effect. One of the towers started to come down. No it did fall to the side. It seemed to collapse slowly. Perhaps crumble would be a better way of describing it.”

This strange episode reminded me of the weird Livermore holographic-type phenomena. The “vision” reportedly looked real to the startled men but was not something that actually happened in objective reality. “This sounds like a major event,” Geller exclaimed. He said he was surprised that he couldn’t remember it, but I suspect Neff may not have told him about it, though they had met previously. “But I can remember on many, many occasions when strange and bizarre phenomena would occur when I am being filmed for television or [interviewed for] radio. But they’re never negative. They’re always bewildering, strange, mysterious, but they would never hurt anyone.”

“It was a very, very top secret installation, which I can’t talk about,” Geller told me. “But for those credible, quite prestigious scientists to see such a phenomena is just mind blowing.”

I was interested to read what Jacobsen had been told by Green about the “experiencers” he had been studying. “They are all high functioning individuals, many prodigious savants, most of whom carry a high security clearance,” he told her. “They are members of Special Forces, members of intelligence community, employees of aerospace companies, officers in the military, guards of military bases, policemen. Often injuries take place on a military bivouac, [which is] an overnight mission at a secure location for the purpose of guarding, reconnaissance, or some kind of exploration. …Common injuries are from something that is airborne. [Something] that emits some kind of a light or a beam. Some orbs.” After I read what Jacobsen had quoted from her personal meeting with Green, I was immediately reminded of what I had read and what I had discussed years ago on dramatic UAP injury cases investigated firsthand by journalist Bob Pratt (3) and computer scientist and astronomer Dr. Jacques Vallee (4). Both men had investigated the unprecedented UFO wave that broke out on the Brazilian island of Colares in 1977-78. Both had interviewed a lady medical doctor there by the name of Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira who had treated approximately three dozen patients with burns reportedly caused by thin white light beams related to area UFO activity at the time. The light beams always seemed to strike the neck and torso areas of their victims. The patients would describe how they temporarily felt immobilized, and how the beam of light, an estimated three inches in diameter, would feel “almost as hot as a cigarette burn.” After a few minutes the beam would gradually retract and disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared. Pratt interviewed one woman in Colares who described how she had been hit by a very hot light beam three separate times in succession one night in September 1978, by what looked like a man with unusually small eyes in something resembling a diving suit. She said the figure held a pistol looking device in its hands from which the beam originated, leaving a triangular pattern of marks just over her right breast and which temporarily bled afterwards.

Two of the Brazilian doctor’s patients had died. One was a woman who seemed very frightened by her experience and who was treated for a large burn on her chest. She died some 8 hours after being treated for her burns of a heart attack, which the doctor felt may have been brought on by the traumatic experience. About a month later, the doctor also saw a fisherman, in his early 30s, just two hours before he suddenly died. For some reason, the Brazilian Air Force, which was on the island investigating the many reports, would not allow an autopsy of the body.

“Yes, Jacques, Kit, and I have discussed the Colares cases extensively together and separately,” Nolan acknowledged in an email when I mentioned the Brazilian cases to him. “Sadly, no ability to get blood samples.” I asked Nolan about what they might be looking for as I had read of how he was one of the world’s leading research scientists specializing in genetics, immunology, and bioinformatics. As I had specifically asked about the DNA and genetics, he explained “We are not looking for injury in the DNA. We were first looking for common inflammatory events in the immune system, not the DNA. That said, are there similarities in the DNA of people who seem to claim such injury? In other words, is there a biosignature?” In that regard, Nolan did state how they had to determine if these “experiencers” were “commonly hallucinating” in some way, adding that he was “not disparaging these people,” and then too were any possibly being “targeted for their genetics,” which he confessed is an area that “gets into conspiracy theory,” an area he admitted that he was “loathe to tread” in. Or, alas, was there “something else that correlates with the injury and DNA.”

Usually the Colares patients of Dr. Carvalho would return to normal after seven days. Though she admitted that she didn’t have access to a sophisticated lab at the time, she was able to determine that a drop had occurred in the red blood cell levels of her patients. They would suffer physical weakness, some were barely able to walk, complaining also of dizziness, headaches, numbness, trembling, pallid complexion, suffering low arterial pressure and anemia with low hemoglobin levels.

As there are numerous reports of healing cases that have been reported (see my book review in this issue of Preston Dennett’s The Healing Power of UFOs) I asked if they had looked into any of those and Nolan informed me that they hadn’t. The injury cases so far seemed to be of primary interest to them.